(ERNST TOLLER)

BY T. N. JAGADISAN

On 22nd May, Ernst Toller, German playwright, was found dead, hanging in his hotel room, suspended from his dressigg-gown cord. It was a sad end for a sad but great life. When one thinks of the many references to suicide in his plays, one sees that for Toller suicide was not a new idea. Toller was a great writer and a great fighter. But his writings indicate a gloominess of temper born of the knowledge of much suffering. He suffered in his own person. He knew and could imagine vividly the sufferings of others. But he was full of dreams, and the dreams kept him on. In his powerful autobiography, "I was a German", where he speaks of his adventures and hair-breadth escapes, of his sufferings in prison-life, of the manner in which he drained to the dregs the cup of official brutality, Ernst Toller gives evidence of an optimism maintained in the face of intolerable suffering. Toller did not despair:

"No, I had never been alone all these five years, never alone in my comfortless abandonment. The sun and the moon had consoled me, the wind that flurried the puddles in the yard, and the grass that sprang up in spring in the cracks of the stones. All these were my friends telling of greetings from the world outside, of comradeship among the prisoners, of belief in a world of justice, of freedom, of humanity, in a world without fear and without hunger."

This he wrote at thirty when he was not tired, though his hair had turned grey. But when he took the fatal decision the other day ‘not to be,’ he must have felt like his own Eugene Hinkemann, who exclaims:

"I haven’t the strength to go on. I haven’t the strength to fight or the strength to believe. A man who has no strength for dreams has lost the strength to live….Living is only being hurt and wanting to go on….I won’t go on."

Toller lost the strength to dream. His hope was ‘unwilling

to be fed.’ Those who may be inclined to blame him for raising the impious hand of self-slaughter against sacred, God-given life must remember that the world has its share of blame in the tragedy. He took the suffering of the world on him and crucified himself. Indeed it was Toller’s fancy (perhaps belief) that Jesus Christ was not nailed upon the cross by men, but that he crucified himself. Crucifixion, self-slaughter, was for him the only Christian way.

Toller imagines Christ-like the sick man of his Transfiguration, who has tried to redeem the world with love but has failed.

"I’ll tell you-simply to teach humanity that the only infallible panacea for all its ills is universal suicide. It is no good trying to cure them with love–I’ve tried it and I know…."

The sick man, therefore, proposes to build chambers for self-annihilation for all. This is no pious or healthy sentiment, it is true, but it is passionate expression born of vivid imaginative suffering. It touches the imagination which is the instrument of morality. In suffering are we all united; and we need to feel that the earth is a single mighty womb quivering in travail–a convulsed, lacerated, bleeding womb, bearing all its humanity anew.

Toller is of the expressionist school of dramatists, and the emphasis in his plays is on ideas and emotions rather than on character or situation. By resort to metaphor, fable, parable allegory, by the introduction of visions, voices and skeletons, dim forms which flit hither and thither, the dramatic storm of human passion is vividly portrayed. The characters do not matter as individuals. Indeed, a playwright like Toller refuses to create individuals. He prefers types, and amidst the bewildering number of his dramatis personae, the majority of characters are anonymous, and we know of the characters as Husband, Wife, Student, Professor, Agitator, Sick Man, Woman, First Workman, Second Workman, Third Workman and so on. Such a scheme is in keeping with the dramatist’s purpose, for he is out to show that they are nothing more than the victims of a system. Toller’s plays are tragedies, but (as in the social and domestic tragedies of Galsworthy) the conflict is not between the hero and the villain or between man and fate. It is between the individual and the social and political system of which he is the product and victim. "Society is the wicked villain; Capitalism is an ogre; Militarism is a demon; Convention is a tyrant." Life is a wasteful business, an exhausting and futile struggle between mutually hostile forces. Toller cries out with one of his own creations:

"They mock at life. They scourge and spit upon and crucify life. Again and again and for ever. There’s no sense in it. Making themselves poor when they might be rich and not need to pray for the kingdom of heaven. The blind and the blinded. Just as if they’d got to. Blind man’s buff. Round and round–for thousands and thousands of years….Ships caught in the current, smashing each other to pieces."

A Jew and a German who was opposed to war and militarism, Toller was exiled from Germany when the Nazis came into power. When a certain dictator came into power in German–a man, says Toller, who tolerated no writers unless they were prepared to become his slaves and obey him like dogs and glorify his inhuman teachings–Toller’s plays were one and all publicly burnt. This persecution of the products of the mind is proof that the dictators of the world realise the tremendous power of literature and the moral nature of art, and are afraid thereof. But even the power of the dictators is limited, and art transcends the barriers of nationality and climate. Art may be killed for a time and in a certain land. But, across the border, the word of man may save itself. Toller and his art found harbour in hospitable England, the country of renowned exiles and the home of lost causes. Thus, his plays came to be published in ‘the land of Shakespeare and Shelley,’ ‘the scene of the author’s involuntary, yet voluntary exile,’ the land which became a second home to him.

In life and in letters, Toller was a great champion of the working man. A comrade in prison with working men, he identified himself with them. The masses to him are not mere crowds. They are individuals with a right to happiness and freedom. He could never understand ‘cultured’ aloofness from the masses, born of ease and comfort:

In The Machine Wreckers, a drama of the Luddite riots in England, Toller portrays vividly the misery and anguish the machine has brought on man. Toller has a fierce hatred of machinery, for it has become the master of man. The author has been accused of partisanship, of portraying the manufacturer as an out-and-out villain. In this respect, he has been compared unfavourably with Galsworthy. The Strife is certainly fair to both sides, but is there not something of the unreality of an academic debate about it? Detachment is a rare virtue but the dramatist gains more by passionately taking sides. As a drama, The Machine Wreckers has gained immensely by the author’s fierce advocacy of the worker’s cause.

We get the best of Toller’s art and thought in Masses and Man, his finest and best known play. It is an attack on violence and the mechanical civilisation, written in the abstract and symbolical manner. Mixing representations of reality with dream-pictures, it is the presentation of spiritual, not concrete reality. Considered as a whole, it is visionary insight. Toller wrote in prison, in a kind of torturing spiritual chaos, seeing visions of faces, "daemonic faces, faces tumbling over each other in grotesque somersaults." Shivering with fever, he wrote what literally broke out from him, and did not stop until his fingers, clammy and trembling, refused to serve him. Strictly speaking, there are no human beings in the play; the artist passes beyond their human identity and sees them as symbols of life and death. Toller has described this process admirably:

"This one may be a workman, the next a farmer, the next a clerk….I see the broad-backed farmer and the narrow-chested little clerk as clearly. Then….suddenly…..they are no longer human beings, X and Y and Z, but dreadful puppets dimly aware of the compelling fate that governs them."

The chief figure of the play is a woman, who leads a revolt against the war the State is waging. She wants to set free all the slaves working in the coal-mines and munition factories. The revolt is successful, but the rebels, in their intoxication of success, want to start another war against the State. The woman pleads with them to desist from violence, but in vain. When the rebellion is crushed, the woman herself is made the scapegoat and is sentenced to execution. The play is an attack on violence of any sort–capitalist, communist, patriotic. The unjust State and the brutal mob alike are not able to understand Sonia the woman, who is but a symbol of the divine in humanity. The doctrine implied in the play is the doctrine of universal love and total abandonment of force, the doctrine vainly preached to an unbelieving world by the greatest ones of the earth–Buddha, Christ, Tolstoy, Gandhi. If Toller opposed the apotheosis of the State, he was equally opposed to the deification of the masses. The masses are full of fury and prejudice and become an easy prey to the machinations of the opportunist agitator. Sonia cries passionately, but vainly:

For Toller, the great Revolution that can save us is the transformation of the human heart by love. There is no virtue in systems as such. A wise old beggar in one of his plays says:

"I have lived under three governments. All governments cheat the people, some more, others less. Those that cheat them least are good governments."

The theme of war, and its wastefulness and horror are dealt with in Transfiguration, Masses and Man, Hinkeman and No More Peace. Toller cannot respond to the sentiment of fighting for the sake of the fatherland. The cruelty of the war is all for the sake of a small handful of rich men, who feast and debauch and gamble with the products of the workers’ labour. Friedrich, who is a Jew and who is very much in the position in which Toller stood during the times of the War, refuses to participate in war:

"Madness, madness. Where? Where to go? Anything, anything to escape! A million shattered arms are stretched towards me. The agonising cries of a million mothers echo in my ears. Where, where? The unborn children whimper. The madmen cry. Oh! holy weeping! Speech defiled! Mankind defiled! For country’s sake! Oh! God…...Can it really be? Can it really be?….No, no, no! A thousand times no! Rather wander without rest, without hope."

Hinkeman is a powerful tragedy of a man who has lost his manhood in the war and is for ever miserable. He cries out in agony: "The world has lost its soul and I my sex."

Hopla, Such is Life is rather a poor play with a good idea. The main idea is somewhat like Bernard Shaw’s, that it is often the lunatic that is more sensible than his keepers. The Blind Goddess is a powerful play, representing the miscarriage of justice and suggesting the thin border that often divides vice from virtue. Here, as everywhere in Toller, there is powerful dialogue and passionate expression of emotion.

In Toller’s plays, there’s God’s plenty of suffering. But here is no paean of sorrow, no praise of poverty. Suffering, in these plays, degrades and defeats, for it arises out of a cruel and ill-ordered society. In a famous preface, Toller distinguished between two kinds of suffering: the suffering that could be vanquished, viz., the base, sordid miseries which arise out of an inadequate social and political system; and the other residue of suffering, ‘the pain of personality,’ the lonely suffering, suffering imposed upon mankind by life and death. Only this residue is necessary and inevitable, and represents the tragic element of life and its symboliser, art.

It was against the avoidable part of human suffering that Toller fought in life and in literature. For him, art was no luxury unrelated to the problems of life. It was a weapon with which to serve life, to fight evil. For he held that "beneath the yoke of barbarism one must not keep silent; one must fight. Whoever is silent at such a time is a traitor to humanity."

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